RAE o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-08-15 published
Professor played a role in defeat of
SSAINTURENT government
By M.J. STONE
Special to The Globe and Mail Friday, August 15,
2003 - Page R5
Nearly four decades after Louis
SSAINTURENT had been Prime Minister
of Canada, McGill professor James
MALLORY was surprised to discover
how influential he had been in the defeat of Mr.
SSAINTURENT's
Liberals in 1957. The revelation occurred in 1992 when the cabinet
papers of the
SSAINTURENT government, which had been sealed for
35 years, were made available to the public.
Unknown to Professor
MALLORY, a radio interview he gave in the
wake of the 1957 election had caught the Prime Minister's ear.
The Liberals had been reduced to 105 seats in the House, seven
fewer than the Conservatives. But the Grits were still in a position
to form a minority government with the aid of the 25 elected
members of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, later to
become the New Democratic Party.
Mr. SSAINTURENT found himself at a crossroads. While his party
was clearly in decline, the Conservatives were on the rise and
many questioned whether the Liberals still had a legal mandate
to govern. When Mr.
SSAINTURENT arrived in cabinet that morning,
Prof. MALLORY's radio interview was still ringing in his ears.
Prof. MALLORY, who died in Montreal on June 24, said in the interview
that if the Liberals continued to govern it would result in a
constitutional crisis. He believed it was the responsibility
of John DIEFENBAKER and the Conservatives to form a government.
The cabinet papers clearly reflect Prof.
MALLORY's influence
over the Prime Minister that morning. Mr.
SSAINTURENT demanded
a copy of the
MALLORY interview and after carefully studying
the radio transcripts, he handed the rule of government over
to the Tories.
Highly regarded as the foremost expert in Canadian legal and
federal structures, Prof.
MALLORY was often called on to advise
governments about constitutional procedures. McGill professor
Charles TAILOR/TAYLOR said another good example occurred in 1979.
"Joe CLARK's
Conservatives had just lost a parliamentary vote,"
Prof. TAILOR/TAYLOR recalled. "The governor-general, Ed
SCHREYER, telephoned
McGill's political science department, looking for Jim. It caused
something of a stir when he couldn't be found immediately.
SCHREYER
was frantic for
MALLORY's advice. The governor-general was unsure
how to proceed.
"Jim was eventually found and consulted. His advice was that
the Conservatives should call an election -- exactly what Joe
CLARK did."
The son of a county sheriff, James Russell
MALLORY was born on
February 5, 1916. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from the
University of New Brunswick in 1937 and later studied law at
Edinburgh and Dalhousie universities.
He met his American-born wife, Frances
KELLER, in Scotland, and
the couple married in 1940. They had two sons: James and Charles.
Prof. MALLORY joined the faculty of the University of Saskatchewan
in 1941. Later, he taught at the University of Toronto and Brandon
College before moving to McGill in 1946.
A respected scholar and lawyer, Prof.
MALLORY was an "old-school"
professor who taught at McGill for 45 years. His reputation as
a constitutional expert was solidified in 1954 when he published
Social Credit and the Federal Power in Canada. The quintessential
text mapped out the constitutional parameters of federal/provincial
relations.
"James MALLORY was a discreet and modest man," McGill professor
Sam NOUMOFF recalled. "He had a profound understanding of morality
and he was incapable of self-promotion. He worked on university
committee after committee while holding many teaching responsibilities.
"Jim wasn't the sort of man who sought public approval, he just
did things because they were the right thing to do."
His son James, who lives in Britain, summed up his father's idealism:
"He had a bloody-minded stubbornness. It would manifest sometimes
in allowing discussions to go on and on. Then he would do exactly
what he intended to do in the first place. Somehow it never impaired
his reputation as a genuine democrat."
Prof. MALLORY was the founder of both the Canadian Studies program
at McGill and the Canadian Association of University Professors.
After retiring in 1982 he was appointed professor emeritus and
continued to teach for another 10 years. In 1964, he was elected
to the Royal Society of Canada and was later awarded the Queen's
Silver Jubilee Medal in 1977.
In 1995, McGill founded the James R. Mallory lecture series,
a one-day event that features a special guest who lectures about
Canadian issues. Past guests have included Bob
RAE,
Peter
WHITE/WHYTE
and Phyllis
LAMBERT.
The organizers of the event say that this
year's lecture will focus on Prof.
MALLORY's legacy.
Prof. MALLORY died 11 weeks after the death of his wife on what
would have been their 63rd anniversary.
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RAE o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-09-13 published
Singer was hit on Hit Parade
Canadian-born performer played violin with Jack Benny and posed
as wife of Sid Caesar
By James McCREADY
Special to The Globe and Mail Saturday, September
13, 2003 - Page F11
She was called "Canada's First Lady of Song." In the late 1940s,
singer Gisele
MacKENZIE was so popular on Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation radio that she was known just by her first name.
When she was 23, she headed off to Hollywood, where she became
one of the main singers on Your Hit Parade, a popular American
network television show in the 1950s. By the time television
started in Canada in 1952, she was already a star in the United
States, appearing on programs with Jack Benny and later with
Sid Caesar, the hottest comedian of his day.
Gisele MacKENZIE, who has died at the age of 76, was not always
known by that name. On the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation,
she was known simply as Gisele, though a 1950 Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation press release did call her by her proper name --
Gisele LAFLECHE. As soon as she moved to CBS in 1951, she adopted
the stage name Gisele
MacKENZIE.
The reason, she told a New York
reporter in 1955, was that the name Gisele
LAFLECHE "sounded
too much like a striptease artist's." The real explanation was
an American audience would have trouble with so French a name.
It was the television network that ordered the name change.
Marie
Marguerite
Louise Gisele
LAFLECHE was born on January 10,
1927, in Winnipeg. The name
MacKENZIE was from her paternal grandmother.
Her father, Georges, was a doctor, who played the violin, and
her mother, Marietta
MANSEAU, was a concert pianist and singer
as a young woman. Ms.
MacKENZIE started playing the violin seriously
when she was 7. She made her first public performance at the
Royal Alexandra Hotel in Winnipeg at the age of 12.
When she was 14, her family sent her to the Royal Conservatory
of Music in Toronto. She studied the violin and the piano, and
planned on being a concert violinist. Later in life, a story
circulated that she never took voice lessons, but Jim
GUTHRO,
who was at the conservatory at the same time, remembered a voice
teacher who took an interest in her. He also remembered that
she attended at the same time as Robert
GOULET and they would
sing together.
When she first came to Toronto, she stayed at Rosary Hall, a
residence for Catholic girls on Bloor Street at the top of Jarvis
Street. Tess
MALLOY, who was there at the same time, remembered
her. "She lived right across the hall from me. She and her girlfriend
used to drive us nuts practising the violin."
Ms. MALLOY didn't remember her singing at the residence, but
somewhere along the way someone discovered Ms.
MacKENZIE could
sing. It was close to the end of the war and she started to perform
for groups of servicemen. It was then that she was discovered
by musician Bob
SHUTTLEWORTH, a lieutenant who led a band for
the Royal Canadian Navy.
Right after the war, she started singing with Mr.
SHUTTLEWORTH's
band at the Glenmount Hotel on the Lake of Bays, north of Toronto.
Mr. SHUTTLEWORTH, who later became her manager and her husband,
took her to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which then
broadcast live popular music over the radio.
"Bob SHUTTLEWORTH called me at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
and said, 'Get a studio, a piano and a vocal mike. I have someone
I want you to hear,' recalled Jackie
RAE, then a music producer
at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, later leader of his
own band (and, incidentally, the uncle of former Ontario premier
Bob RAE.) "I remember her wonderful voice and how fresh she was.
We hired her straight away to do three programs a week."
The program was Meet Gisele, and it ran for 15 minutes on Monday,
Wednesday and Friday. The program started on October 8, 1946,
and lasted for four years. She was so popular the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation used her in other programs with names such as The
Girl Next Door or The Song Pluggers.
In 1951, Ms.
MacKENZIE was spotted by Bing
CROSBY's son, and
went to work in the United States for Bob
CROSBY's
Club 15, bumping
the Andrews Sisters from their regular slot. The pay was $20,000
(U.S.) a year, worth $150,000 in today's money. She was 23.
The money was something Canada could never match. Mr.
GUTHRO,
later head of Variety at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation,
guesses she was making $200 a week for her radio programs.
"Gisele Leaves for Hollywood. Canada's Loss," read a headline
in one Toronto paper. The article guessed at the pay package,
and it was right.
Ms. MacKENZIE was about to have her best decade ever in show
business. After a short stint on Club 15, she worked on the Mario
Lanza Show, before landing her full-time job at Your Hit Parade.
The idea behind the NBC program was to take the top seven songs
on the hit parade that week and have them done by the regular
singers in the Your Hit Parade troupe. The half-hour program
was a huge success in the United States and in late 1953 the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation picked it up for a while.
Ms. MacKENZIE was the only regular singer on the program to have
her own hit record, Hard to Get, in 1955.
Though none of her family shared her success, all were musical.
There were her parents, both of whom were serious amateur musicians
two of her sisters sang and played, and a brother played the
cello. Along with Gisele, two of them had what is called perfect
pitch.
"It's rare and she had it," Mr.
RAE said. "You would play four
notes on the piano and she could match them. Perfect pitch isn't
always a great thing, but in her case it was."
Ms. MacKENZIE's training as a classical violinist came in handy
on the Jack Benny program, on which she first appeared in 1955.
The droll comedian always made a thing of how he couldn't play
the violin. One vaudeville-type act they would do on his show
involved her patiently showing him what to do with a violin after
he made some awful screeching noise with his bow.
She was Jack Benny's protégé, and he helped land her own television
program in 1958. Called the Gisele
MacKENZIE
Show, it lasted
only six months.
But she remained famous. At one stage, she was the subject of
This is Your Life, which involved linking up with old Friends
and relatives. She was a regular on game shows that featured
minor celebrities, such as Hollywood Squares.
In 1963, she was cast as Sid Caesar's television wife and made
regular trips to New York City, where the program was done. Like
other television programs of that era, it was live, since videotape
was only just being introduced.
Ms. MacKENZIE also acted and sang in live musicals in the United
States, things such as Annie Get Your Gun and South Pacific.
Over the years, she also worked in Las Vegas, performing in night
clubs there. She returned to Canada for the occasional concert
and television special, including one on the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation in late 1960. It was about "her story book career"
and included the yarn, always told by her publicists, of how
she decided to take up singing after she lost her $3,000 violin.
By the end of the 1960s, the big work started to dry up and Canadian
newspapers were running the occasional "Where Are They Now" articles.
She was in a sprawling ranch house in suburban Encino, Calif.
She also owned property in Palmdale and Marin County, Calif.,
as well as a house on Lake Manitoba back home.
All that detail came up in a nasty divorce from Mr.
SHUTTLEWORTH
in 1968. Because he was also her manager, he kept 10 per cent
of her gross income for the next three years. She later married
a banker, Robert
KLEIN, but that also ended in divorce.
During the rest of her career, Ms.
MacKENZIE kept working in
regional theatre and made guest appearances on television series,
including MacGyver and Murder, She Wrote, as well as singing
stints on programs such as the Dean Martin Show. She also did
television commercials in the United States and Canada.
Ms. MacKENZIE had some odd hobbies. She collected and mixed exotic
perfumes and in the 1950s she took up target shooting, becoming
an expert shot. She and her first husband had a large collection
of pistols, rifles and shotguns. In her later years, like many
Hollywood stars, she was involved with Scientology.
Ms. MacKENZIE, who died in Burbank, Calif., on September 5, had
two children with Mr.
SHUTTLEWORTH, a son Mac and a daughter
Gigi (short for Gisele)
DOWNS.
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